It is therefore RESOLVED [00.74] that the IANA staff is advised
that alpha-2 codes not on the ISO 3166-1 list are delegable as
ccTLDs only in cases where the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency, on its
exceptional reservation list, has issued a reservation of the code
that covers any application of ISO 3166-1 that needs a coded
representation in the name of the country, territory, or area
involved;

2000-09-28

Quantum lithography.
Here's a novel application for entangled photons: use the
entanglement to multiply their effective frequency, then do
photolithography with the more accurate beam to skirt the
Rayleigh
criterion. This process was proposed by scientists at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Wales in a paper
published this week in Physical Review Letters. The
JPL press
release explains:

This process, in essence, enables the entangled photon pair to
produce patterns twice as small on each side of a chip's surface as
can be created by the single photons in the conventional optical
lithography procedures. Entangling more than two photons would
improve results even further.

I first came across this story in a
CNN
report and was put off by its golly-gee-whiz tone. Looking for
anything on the Web closer to the science, I found only the
aforementioned press release from JPL, and it is, I report with
trepidation, a mother-lode of gee-whiz.
Science
Daily has picked up the story but simply runs the press release unedited.

Note added 11:39 pm:
Jonathan P. Dowling, the co-author cited in the JPL press piece, kindly
sent me the URL of this AIP
news release. As usual the AIP explains the issues in an approachable way,
as witness this summary:

The Rayleigh criterion for far-field light is mainly a limit of
classical, pre-20th century physics, and not of the "quantum"
physics discovered and explored since the 20th century.

2000-09-25

8:46:34 AM

Introducing XNS.
This will be huge news for personal privacy. A new technology called
XNS went live at 7:00 am Eastern time. It marries XML with
Web agents and contract law to put you firmly in control of
information about yourself and the transactions you conduct over the
Net.

XNS was developed by OneName
to enable Internet
users and businesses to exchange data in an automated way with
privacy protection built in at the core. It's based entirely on
Internet standards like HTTP and XML, and it will be fully open-source.

What sets XNS apart from all the various wannabe-standard
proprietary technologies is that OneName is licensing the patent
that governs this technology to a newly formed non-profit, the
XNS Public Trust Organization, or XNSORG.

XNS has two basic parts. First is the Web agent
technology that enables individuals and business to share
information, creating permanent links that can withstand the rigors
of new email addresses, physical moves, and marital name
changes. For my money the neatest idea in the whole package is that
every link is governed by a legally enforceable privacy contract
aimed at giving every XNS community member control and ownership of
his/her/its personal data, once and for all.

Second, XNS has a next-generation naming system -- to find and link
to these web agents -- that is designed to avoid all the problems
with DNS, both in terms of the size of the namespace and the huge
intellectual property issues that have come up.
Some of the initial uses for XNS include:

single sign-in at every Web site that supports XNS

spam elimination by requiring all new correspondents to agree
to your privacy policy before allowing their mail through

an address book that is never out of date

The key to it all is XNSORG,
which is the non-profit tasked with
coordinating the maintenance of the XNS technology and creating a
governance structure for the XNS community. XNSORG will do things
like establish technical and operational specifications for the
system to ensure quality of service, design a dispute resolution
system to handle breaches of privacy contracts, and organize working
groups to extend the capabilities of the system.

I don't believe there's ever been such a situation on the Internet
where an intellectual property holder hands over a patent and all
their source code to a non-profit that answers only to the Internet
community.

The gateway to the benefits of XNS technology is your personal
name. The first operational XNS Naming Agency, OneName itself,
is offering one personal name, free for life, to the first million
applicants. Visit the XNSORG
services page to reserve your chosen personal name. (Note that
the OneName registration site requires JavaScript to function. Other
agencies will be coming online beginning next month.) Think
carefully about what name you choose -- XNS names are meant to be
permanent. The name can consist of up to 64 characters in any
Unicode language. (Mine is "Keith Dawson".)

Adam Engst has written a detailed and even-handed
introduction
to XNS, its promise, and the obstacles it faces in this week's
TidBITS newsletter.

Note that the day after XNS went live, VeriSign (which now owns Network
Solutions Inc.) put out a press release preannouncing
ENUM -- an attempt to use the
domain name system (which NSI happens to control) as a universal name
directory based on telephone numbers. (DNS is utterly unsuited to the
task -- it's a naming service, not a directory service.) It may be no
coincidence that OneName had informed NSI of its plans, under non-disclosure,
a year ago, at the instigation of a now-departed executive. Think of
ENUMWorld as a sowing of FUD to counter XNS -- you won't be too far off
the mark.

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